/2/ - 日本 ~redux~

Regardless of what the answer is, i'll buckle down and do it. I'd like to know as soon as possible though.

Learning kanji alone is stupid and I don't understand why they teach it like that. What you want to do is learn vocabulary and use the kanji in their respective context. However, there are a fair number of "basic" kanji that you will be seeing everywhere, so you may want to take those apart and learn them stand-alone.

I learned a lot of kanji before realizing that there are dozens of occasions where it's not even possible to know the pronunciation beforehand (for example, 素人. If you read that as すじん、すにん、もとひと、もとにん、もとじん or whatever other combination you can think of, well fuck you, it's しろうと because ???).
Also, even if you know how to pronounce something, sometimes the kana shifts to their softer versions because "it's easier to pronounce". Most of these are quite easy to tell. If it's an iterated kanji, you can be fairly confident it's going to be XX', with X' being the softened version of X, like 所々 [ところどころ], 深々 [ふかぶか], etc. But there are times when you can't.

It all boils down to what you want to do with the language: Are you learning just to read manga/VNs/games/etc, do you plan on communicating (either verbally or through text) with other people? Will you put use to this for purposes other than your own enjoyment (i.e., translating)?
If you're learning to read manga or VNs or translating, then don't bother with pronunciation as much as meaning. Meaning is way more important because even if you can't figure out how the fuck you pronounce 素顔, you know it means "uncovered/naked face". The only problem with this is that when you find words like 負った and you have no idea how to pronounce and you need to look it up, you have to rely on writing something similar, i.e. 負ける, deleting the kana and attaching った to the root. Or supposing you don't know how to write 世話, you end using 世界 and 話す and then copypasting the kanji you need.

If you're trying to use this for communication, then sorry, you more than likely will need to pick up the sounds as much as the meanings. The best thing you can do, probably, is picking a context and making some chart or something to have all the words you need on it. You know, like, drawing the parts of a house and little arrows pointing towards things in japanese.

Whatever you do, don't bother with learning kanji stand-alone because that's just pointless grinding that won't help you when they give you a text to read and there's that stupid word that has a different pronunciation from normal because of the stupid fucking context.

>>1067
>I don't plan on learning stroke order and I don't think i'll need it for my purposes.
Also, if you're planning on writing kanji/words by hand, for the love of god, DO USE THE STROKE ORDERS. It's not worth learning if you use electronic means to study and plan to never draw the damn chicken scratches in real life, but if you actually do have the time to write them, by hand, word by word, for learning, then at least do it correctly. Most electronic dictionaries that get input by drawing only recognize the kanji if you follow the correct strike order. It's also easier to memorize if you remember how to draw it.

>>1067
>fair number of "basic" kanji that you will be seeing everywhere
The issue with this method or the idea of just learning a singlular, "most common", pronunciation, is that is requires me to have a lot of prior knowledge of the language. I want to learn in a systematic way with no extra research needed on my part. When learning english, you don't skip z and j because they're less common than a e and g and you can learn most words without them. I get Kanji is different, but isn't learning the basic tools important?
>It all boils down to what you want to do with the language
I'm just doing it for the vns right now and to talk on image boards, but I don't know if that'll always be the case. I don't want to be stuck and stunted in case I ever feel like doing something else with it if you know what I mean. Reading something without knowing how to pronounce it would kind of break immersion, right?
>>1068
I don't plan on writing in any practical setting. I just use writing as a memorization tool. In high school german that was my study method. I didn't give a fuck about it and I barely cruised by, but it did teach me some things. I've been drawing chicken scratch for days now over and over again and it looks accurate enough. If I ever need to know the proper way of writing them, can't I just go back and learn it quickly? I don't understand these weird, "electronic study tools". Quizlet flashcards are good enough for me.
Also, doesn't 素人 and 負った go with some vocabulary word? If I don't know how to pronounce them, isn't that because I happen to not know the right vocabulary? I think I'll slowly grind through kanji meanings in addition to regular textbook study. After i'm done I'll go back and learn the readings, which i'll already kind of know because of vocab learning.

>>1068
>Most electronic dictionaries that get input by drawing only recognize the kanji if you follow the correct strike order.
Also, aren't there electronic dictionaries that recognize radicals? Isn't that how physical kanji dictionaries organized?

>>1069
>I want to learn in a systematic way with no extra research needed on my part
Welcome to the (suicidal) self-taught japanese group. It's not like other languages because the writing system is different, so you can't treat it like german or english. I know you don't, but there really isn't any comprehensive list of "most used words with uncommon pronunciation depending on context" guide, as far as I know. You need to learn vocabulary beforehand before even trying to figure out with things you need and what you don't. Japanese people have it easier since they only have to learn the kanji and not the different spellings/pronunciations since they already possess the vocabulary, but you don't have that luxury. You are doing it the hard way, and there really is no easy way.

>The issue with this method or the idea of just learning a singlular, "most common", pronunciation, is that is requires me to have a lot of prior knowledge of the language
There aren't really that many. You will notice these right away because 込, 上, 下 and many others appear virtually everywhere, some with many different pronunciations depending on the context. So when you see 上がり, 上げる, 上る, you ought to realize this fucker is one of those you need to learn stand-alone. I'd dare to say the first 2 leves of jōyō contain about 90% of these and that it's safe to learn those along vocabulary, but don't grind past those 250, and if possible learn them within some sensible context.

>Reading something without knowing how to pronounce it would kind of break immersion, right?
Rikaichan for imageboards, ITH + H-codes for VNs. But don't become dependent on them, only use them if you forgot how to pronounce something, and practice with that which you don't know.

>If I ever need to know the proper way of writing them, can't I just go back and learn it quickly?
No, you have already learned it one way, changing that requires even more effort. It's not efficient. I know it seems stupid, but if you used a brush instead of a pen you would notice right away why trace order is important, and since you're already going through the pain of writing by hand them, you could at least memorize it the right way.

>I don't understand these weird, "electronic study tools".
I meant computers and not using textbooks or writing kanji. I probably know how to write about 50 by hand, even though I know about 750. Had I been drawing along with my study I'd probably know how to draw at least 650 of those.

>Also, doesn't 素人 and 負った go with some vocabulary word? If I don't know how to pronounce them, isn't that because I happen to not know the right vocabulary? I think I'll slowly grind through kanji meanings in addition to regular textbook study. After i'm done I'll go back and learn the readings, which i'll already kind of know because of vocab learning.

素人 goes, but 負った is a proper verb, by itself. The difference is that 素人 is a compound word written with the kanji for "naked/pure/elementary" and "person". Without knowing what it means, all the meaning you can get from that is that it means either something like "naked man" (in some abstract sense, as in "this is the nature of man without all the social bullshit") or "pure man". Turns out it just means "Amateur". Sum to that the fucked up pronunciation and you have one of the most nasty logics as seen in japanese.
負う, on another hand, is a verb that means "to undertake", "to take responsibility", "to carry on one's back". The kanji means: "defeat, negative, -, minus, bear, owe, assume a responsibility", so it actually makes sense in meaning even if you don't know the pronunciation (you only see root + past conjugation, so it very obviously means "undertaken (some action)". However, 負け means "Defeat, "to lose (a game)", and is by far much more used than 負う (you have probably seen this in games as "omake", meaning extra, or some anime character shouting "makenai!" (don't lose). Hence why I say that it's more than likely that if you know the meaning, but not the word, and if you want to check that up, you're more than likely to use the more common 負け and change the conjugation to 負った than to look it up through radicals.

>>1070
Yes, jisho does an excellent work, but only if you know how to look up radicals. Or if the quality of the text is good enough that you can figure out what the fuck the radicals of the kanji are (and believe me, sometimes the text size gets so dense you can't). Go ahead, use jisho.org and try to search these I posted through radicals. The first took me 5 minutes, the second about 6 seconds until I realized what it was and dropped the radical search. I had to draw the third to find it. Original size, exactly how I had to look them up. You will notice that scaling them up helps, but not much.

>>1072
>No, you have already learned it one way, changing that requires even more effort. It's not efficient. I know it seems stupid, but if you used a brush instead of a pen you would notice right away why trace order is important, and since you're already going through the pain of writing by hand them, you could at least memorize it the right way.

Also worth mentioning that some mangaka write some dialoge by hand and it makes it easier to identify it by following how they were written. Same with VNs when they show handwritten text, and, god forbid, when they change the script.

>>1072
I guess i'll learn stroke order then. What I was most worried about is that the same multiple kanji put together would have different pronunciations and meanings depending on the context like some words in english, but all of your examples seem to have kanji plus other types of characters attachted to them. That means if I know the complete word, I should be fine, right? The thing is, learning the official kanji list seems like it will aid me in learning new vocab. If I learned kanji as I learned new words only, that might be effective in the beginning stages, but if I ever want to read some advanced shit, i'll need more vocab and knowing most of the kanji already in those words already will halve the work when learning new vocab, right? I don't expect kanji to magically make me already know the meaning of words. If i'm gong to learn kanji, I might as well know the meaning associated with it rather than memorize meaningless squiggles, even in the cases where kanji meaning has nothing to do with vocab meaning.

>but if I ever want to read some advanced shit, i'll need more vocab and knowing most of the kanji already in those words already will halve the work when learning new vocab, right?

The thing is, "more advanced vocab" uses most of the kanji you're going to learn along the vocabulary of the simple words. Hell, calculus is called 微分積分学, but by the time you really want to delve into such advanced topics, you will know 微 (minute/infinitesimal) for 微笑み [smile], 分 (part) for 分かる [understand] or [minute (time unit)], 積 (product) for 積み上がり [to stack, to pile up], and 学 (study, learning, science) for 学ぶ or virtually any thing with the tag "science" attached to it.
Quantum Physics is just 量子物理学, from which 量 (quantity->quantified) can inferred from 量的 [quantitative], 子 (child) from, well, "child" (量子 means quantum)*, 物 (thing) from, well, "thing", or maybe 物語 [story] or something like that, 理 (reason, principle) from 理由 (reason, cause, etc.) (物理 is "physics", "principle of {phyisical} things"), and 学 again.
You can also see 子 in 陽子, proton, or 電子, electron, etc.

Hell, this applies even things outside of that but that could be considered more abstract/hard/advanced.
If you want to learn certain topic, new words will appear, but most of the time those words are made up from kanji you know, and if not, then they are mostly used on the context of that topic and not outside of it. I have seen many weird shit in the field of electronics and advanced physics that I haven't seen not even once in VNs, anime, or manga, unless they had some nerd trying to sound cool, and even then the words were dumbed down so even the most ignorant jap could understand it.

I don't have any problems with you or anybody else for that matter trying to learn kanji meaning. What I find stupid is doing so outside of context, or grinding with the pronunciations. Because many words use certain kanji that have nothing to do with the meaning of the very word they compose, and unless you have a dictionary at hand, you can't even tell what it's supposed to mean, even less pronounce it.
Honestly, radical grinding is way more important thank kanji grinding.

I'm going to start using this thread to ask any questions I have since making a new one seems unnecessary. For context, I have no clue how english grammar works. I can read and write perfectly fine, but before today I had no clue what an auxiliary verb is.

When is using 何 necessary? I could say 専門ごすか or 専門は何ごすか and it would mean the same thing, so how am I supposed to know which is correct? I read that 何 has other uses like how and which, but I haevn've gotten there yet.

>>1078
>専門ごすか
I'm going to assume you mean ですか.

専門ですか means "is that [field of] specialty?", and could mean either "Is this your field?" (did you specialize on this subject?) or "Is that a field [of study]?" (do they teach this in colleges?).

専門何ですか is exactly what you read. "what is [subject] major?", in murrican: "What is your major?".

Notice the difference between "Is this your major?" and "What is your major?". In one, you know somebody has knowledge on certain subject and you inquire whether they've specialized on that field or not. On the other case, you are asking (probably because you don't know) WHAT is the thing they majored in.

You use 何 the same way you use it in english. If I'm in your home and I hear an explosion I'm not going to ask "hurr is that a loud sound?" （すごい音ですか？） because that sounds like I'm mentally deficient, I'm going to say "What the fuck did blow up just now?"（今、何が爆発したか？）.

>>1064
This makes a lot of sense. Genki didn't go into that kind of nuance. I got confused because certain things can be omitted if they're implied by context. You can just say [名前]です without 私は, unlike in english. Following that rule, within your scenario it would just be implied that you're asking what the noise is, but apparently not. This concept doesn't exist in murrican, so I don't know what can and can't be omitted.

>>1080
>I got confused because certain things can be omitted if they're implied by context.
For some reason everybody fails to explain why context is important in japanese without making it sound like some sort of esoteric concept that requires extremely deep understanding of the mechanics of the language or something. It's actually fairly simple. It's not that you have to omit things every single time, it's just that certain things are assumed to be obvious and thus implied instead of being stated. These mostly have to do with the subject of a sentence, as you point out. By default (if no subject is specified), it's usually the first person. But if it's not about the subject, it will still be obvious and not some abstract thing that requires you to read books or something.

食べる -> I [will] eat (something).
食べる？ -> [Me?] Eat this?
食べない -> will not eat

But you can change "I" and "me" for any other subject and they still work, provided it's obvious from context (not omitted because of some magical force). Let's just do this now: I'm going to inject some context. You're in my house and I tell you "feel free to eat some grub". After some consideration, you say "okay, I will eat".

Me: りんごを食べていいよ。"You can eat apples if you want."
You: なら、食べる。"Okay, I'll eat".

Now, let's change the scenario a bit. Suppose you bought some exotic crap and I'm just puzzled how somebody could dig that shit.

You:昨日、市場でこの食べ物を買ったよ。"Yesterday, I bought this food on the market".
Me:ええぇ、これ、食べる？ "Huh? can you even eat this?"

Now, let's change the words on this scenario little.

You:昨日、市場でこの食べ物を買ったよ。食べてみたい？ "Yesterday, I bought this food on the market. Want to eat some?"

Then I put an extremely disgusted face. The tones in my voice are sharp and short as I speak.

Me:食べる？動物か？食べないんだよ。 "Me? eat this? Am I an animal or something? I'm not eating this crap."

Then we hear noises coming from next room.

You: お姉さんだ。帰ってたって知らなかったよ。多分疲れてる。今、呼んでいく。 "It's my sister. Didn't know she had come house. She must be tired, I'll go call her."
Me:食べさせるのか？ "Are you going to make her eat this?"
You:いや、もう食べたと思う。"Nah, she probably has had something to eat already".

Notice onee-san was mentioned only once throughout the conversation. In fact, the "default" subject (1st person) from that point onward is shifted to "onee-san", thus she becomes the default subject. We don't even specify who's the subject anymore just because it's obvious, just not stated. Et cetera, it's fairly simple once you get used to it.

———
>You can just say [名前]です without 私は, unlike in english
You are confusing は for "is" in english. The verb "to be" is, by default, implied in japanese. The polite way of stating it is です, while だ accomplishes the same role for informal japanese. But です is NOT the polite version of だ (the proof being that you can use です in questions but not だ).

>学生 -> [A] student. / [Subject] is student (odd to use but valid)
>学生だ -> [subject] is student.
>学生です ->[subject] is student. (polite)

The three are exactly the same and mean the same. は only introduces the topic. I believe Tae Kim likes to translate は like this: "As for…"

私は[名前]です -> "[As for me], I'm [name]".

"That doesn't make any sense!", you may think, but you have to remember は introduces topics, and thus is used virtually anywhere in the sentence if there's a noun (or a nominalized sentence) behind it.

昨日はラメんが食べたんだ。 "I ate ramen yesterday". Or tae kim version: "[As for/speaking about] yesterday, ate ramen".

It takes a little to get used to it but always thing of は as introducing the topic; an arrow with lights and whistles with a sign saying "THIS IS THE TOPIC".


>Following that rule, within your scenario it would just be implied that you're asking what the noise is, but apparently not.
Ah, that example is a hard one because it requires more information to have a real meaning. すごい音ですか？ by itself means "is it a very loud sound?". If you are telling me you love the sound of the turbines of a plane, I may ask "すごい音ですか？" (is it really that loud?) and it's just perfect. Or, following my own example, if you tell me your kitchen exploded yesterday, I may ask "すごい音でしたか？" (It was really loud, wasn't it?).

>>1081
And if "昨日はラーメンが食べたんだ" confuses you, here's the proof of why 昨日 is the topic and not ラーメン.

Me:昨日はラーメンが食べたんだ 。"[As for/speaking about] yesterday, ate ramen".
You:美味しかったか？ "Was [it] tasty?"
Me:ええ。"Yeah".
You:それから？"Then what?" → "what happened after that?" (after eating ramen, what did you do YESTERDAY).

The reason "ramen" isn't mentioned in the same line as "tasty" is because it's assumed (obvious), that the tasty thing is the ramen, and not yesterday, because yesterday can not be 美味しい.

>>1081
>>1083
This makes some sense. Thanks again. Would you recommend I go through Genki and Tae Kim's quide simultaneously?

>>1084
>Would you recommend I go through Genki and Tae Kim's quide simultaneously?
I'd say yes. And other sources that work for you, if you find any.

Honestly, I couldn't finish genki because by the time I picked it up I already knew most of the stuff they teach, and what I knew up to that time was mostly thanks to Tae Kim. However, I think genki is more solid for people who is just starting to grasp the basic of the languages, although I would recommend not to get so attached to it since it is far from perfect. If I recall correctly, the most common complain about genki is that it never leaves the polite forms, which is sort of stupid. There were other things, but honestly I think you should use both and see which one is easier for you to understand. The whole number chapter of genki was nicely explained, if I had to give any opinion on things they did well.

Tae Kim is a speedrun that gives you the basics and some examples of most of the quirks of the language, and starts from dictionary form, then shifts to polite and finalizes with keigo (honorific language). It's basically the guide/manual that you have on your shelf in case you forgot how something works, without having to read a whole chapter for that. Giving it a quick read can make you understand something from genki or other sources that you didn't understand/see at the time.

>>1084
Go through Tae Kim or a grammar sheet / deck and read something easy while looking up words you don't know on jisho

Not OP but would you say using formal language all the time is necessary? Like, for sure when talking to like your co-workers, teachers, employers, etc. But on social media especially, I don't personally see the point. Maybe that one is more obvious, but it feels nebulous to say the least.

>>1091
All the time? No.
You only use it if you feel it's necessary. Either because of context (as you mentioned, when talking with co-workers, boss, etc), or simply because you feel more comfortable using formal speech. For example, when asking for permissions to translate something, or when I'm discussing with jap anons here or in other places, I tend to write in formal form even when it's not really necessary; I'm just showing them that I was willing to learn their language to have a better communication, and that while I was at it, I was going to use it correctly. This hasn't stopped me from going full dick on futaba or other forums, à-la Makise Kurisu, if the heat of the moment made me do so. Practically the same when I go full autistic in english, to be honest.

So, tl;dr this is highly personal, use whatever you feel comfortable with. Most jap anons write informally and with slang, but it's not odd to see the one using -masu and desu everywhere.

Reading without furigana, if the word is understandable through its kanji, should you look up the pronunciation or just skip it since you understand?

>>1093
If you are learning for your own entertainment (eg for reading manga/playing games), you can skip the reading if you don't want to check it. But I recommend looking it up and checking if there's an odd case if it bothers you not knowing how to pronounce it. You will eventually learn which words are like that and won't need to check anymore.
If you're going to use the language actively, then you really should check that up just in case.

>>1064
I started just like you, with tons of free time and tons of desire to learn. If you keep at it every day, it is very easy to integrate the studying into your every day routine.

You can do it! 頑張ろー！！！